I was under the impression that if you went into preferences and selected the number of processors to use or to leave remaining then AE would use the correct number of procs. However I have found that since my machine is a WinTel system with hyperthreading enabled (doubling my processor count effectively) After Effects doesn't recognize the doubled processor count when I use Task Manager and see the system performance tab.

Any ideas? Maybe this has been covered before and there is a link I could get pointed to?

AE only uses physical cores. And you are misunderstanding - HT in no way doubles performance, even if AE would use it. Those virtual cores still run on your physical cores and are just spawned as separate processing loops.

todd, i am not currently working on any ae projects but the next time i do i will screengrab and post. thanks for giving an official adobe word though i dont take myleniums posts lightly. he seems pretty experienced in the forums.

Yeah, on a good day I'm effin' brilliant. It just seems that ever since my illness is eating me alive, there are no good days anymore and I end up posting crap at 3.30 in the morning after only 4 hours of sleep... Anyway, it seems I misremembered some stuff which only applied to CS4. Sorry for the confusion. As Todd said, it would help to know more about the system and whether the virtual cores actually show up . If not, that might indicate a deeper problem like some shared library missing (.NET runtimes and that stuff) or the cores being MIA for otehr reasons...

Anyway, regarding your result: Nothing unusual is happening. You have 24GB of RAM and have left 6GB for other applications. That leaves 18GB for After Effects. You are telling After Effects to use 3GB per rendering process; and the foreground process needs the same amount plus a little bit. At 3GB per process (plus 20% extra for the foreground process's overhead), you can feed 4 background rendering processes and 1 foreground process with 18GB of RAM.

i am going to read that link momentarily, but first i don't understand why two of my cropped taskmgr fields ar not processing any data. given your explanation that should not be the case. half of my hyperthreaded procs are active while half are not. again the taskmgr image is cropped.

(I feel uncomfortable sharing all of my system specs online). However I can verify that all of my CPUs with HT are working for my 3D animation package when I send something to render. I'm not sure why AE doesn't respond in the same fashion.

if you've never heard of anything like that before then all i can say is that you learn something new everyday about people. i am sure there are some adobe users who don't even feel comfortable signing up and posting to these forums. at least i am over that hurdle but privacy is a major concern on the internet if you haven't been paying attention. i don't mean any offense by that statement either, i just think you might not be considering those who value their online privacy from potential wrongdoers.

I used to be a technical support agent for one of the world's largest computer companies (I don't want to say their name, of course...but their initials were HP). And even with a technical background, I can't think of anything someone could possibly do with information on your system specs. Your email, your username, and all of that? Sure, some nefarious individual MIGHT be able to do something with those(if they wanted to spend the time and effort to target you directly), but be at peace; they can't do anything just by knowing your system specs.

i just think you might not be considering those who value their online privacy from potential wrongdoers.

Understood, but in this instance it seems a little more than paranoid. If you go to the doctor's office for a checkup, then intentionally fail to mention the pain in your elbow because you don't trust how they've implemented the HPPA law, you've done yourself little good.

By withholding pertinent information about your system you're impeding an accurate diagnosis.

I think the screenshots I provided and the information about my cpu's not registering fully during a render should be enough information to provide an accurate diagnosis of what is going on with my installation of AE, especially when other software registers "correctly" so to speak.